In the last book, Harry Dresden saved the day. He fought some of the strongest the Red Court of the Vampires had to offer and came out, well, more or less intact. To do so, he also managed to make himself the target of nearly everything in the Nevernever (the mystical other-world from which all the nasties and scaries ultimately come), lose his girlfriend to a bunch of bloodsucking fiends, and instigate an all-out, world-wide war between the White Council of the Wizards and the Red Court.

So yeah. Mixed blessings and all.

Now he’s practically working himself to death to avoid actually being killed. After all, saving the day is nice, but it doesn’t usually come with a check at the end of it, and there are bills to be paid. When we see Harry again, some months after the disastrous events at Bianca’s nasty little costume party, he’s working himself to the bone. He’s become a recluse, hiding from as many people as he can. He does this for two reasons. First, he’s spending a lot of time looking for an antidote to Susan’s vampirism – or semi vampirism, anyway. She hasn’t drunk from a person yet, you see, and until she does that she’s not really a vampire. It’s a hard job, though, which is why she not only turned down Harry’s proposal of marriage but also left the country with instructions that he not try to follow her.

So the love of his life is incommunicado, and Harry doesn’t know if she’s alive or dead – or worse. What’s more, he believes that it is his fault that she got this way, even if it really isn’t. One of the criticisms that can be laid at the feet of Harry Dresden is his deep-seated male chauvinism. He doesn’t believe that women are inferior or anything quite so barbaric as that. He believes that they’re special, that they should be treated with an extra measure of care and respect. He hates the thought of harming a woman, and will go out of his way to see to it that the women he cares about are kept safe from anything that might hurt them.

Unfortunately for him, Harry tends to hang around with women who don’t want to be taken care of, namely Susan Rodriguez and Karrin Murphy. Both of them are strong-willed women who want to be part of Harry’s life, and neither one of them particularly appreciates being told to sit on the sidelines because they’re girls. In fact, this attempt by Harry to protect them, more often than not, brings them more trouble than if he had trusted them to begin with.

I say this because it was good to see him make a little progress in this book. Following the events of Grave Peril, in which she was psychically tortured – though perhaps “raped” would be the better word – by the spells of a dead sorcerer, Murphy found herself broken. She couldn’t sleep, she couldn’t concentrate. She was afraid of everything, a shell of who she had been. So, in order to bring her back at least part of the way, Harry tells her everything – his dark past, the White Council, all the things he’s not supposed to share. While it was by no means a magic recovery potion, it went a long way towards establishing their equality as fellow hunters of evil.

And all this really has little to do with the plot itself, which is a pretty straightforward murder mystery/supernatural power play. Queen Mab of the Winter Court of the Sidhe, needs Harry to find out who killed a servant of the Summer Court, the Summer Knight. Queen Titania of Summer thinks, and not without reason, that it was Mab who had the knight killed. Harry has to get to the truth, and he has to do it before Midsummer’s Eve, lest the two courts go to war and take our world with them.

For the White Council, this is an excellent opportunity. If Dresden succeeds in helping Mab, she will give the Wizards safe passage through the Nevernever, which will in turn allow the Wizards to better prosecute their war against the vampires. If Dresden fails, the vampires will (in theory) be happy, and the war will end on its own. Either way, there’s a very good chance that the White Council will finally rid itself of Harry Dresden, something they’ve been trying to do for quite some time.

So for a simple murder mystery, it’s really not very simple at all. We get a good look at the expanded universe of Harry Dresden, and it’s a scary place to be. This time he’s going up against some truly heavy hitters, with some very serious stakes, not the least of which is his own life and his own free will. For the first time, we are privy to the workings of the White Council, how they work and how they don’t work, and it’s very easy to understand why they and Harry don’t get along so well.

As with the other books, this gets my full recommendation. It’s fast-paced and interesting, and there’s some damn fine character work. A bit of very good banter between Murphy and Harry caught my eye that makes both of them much more interesting and believable (not that they weren’t before). It’s moments like that throughout the series that show Butcher’s care for the characters and his desire that we see them as real as he does. Also, a very nice Indiana Jones reference, only involving unicorns.

So – and you’re going to get tired of hearing me say this – go get this book. Go get all the Dresden books, and settle in for some good reading.

————————————————-
“As I pulled into the parking lot, I reflected that odds were that not a lot of clandestine meetings involving mystical assassination, theft of arcane power, and the between the realms of the supernatural had taken place in a Wal-Mart Super Center. But then again, maybe they had. Hell, for all I knew, the Mole Men used the changing rooms as a place to discuss plans for world domination with the Psychic Jellyfish from Planet X and the Disembodied Brains-in-a-Jar from the Klaatu Nebula. I know I wouldn’t have looked for them there.”
– Harry Dresden, Summer Knight
————————————————-